Murray Stein

More than a mere overview, the book offers readers a strong grounding in the basic principles of Jung's analytical psychology in addition to illuminating insights.

An Introduction

Jung's Map of the Soul

Laura Mei

Why is it so important, especially in psychology, to understand the nature of ego-consciousness? It is because one needs to make adjustments for distortion. Much that passes for knowledge among human beings is actually, upon closer and more critical inspection, merely prejudice or belief based on distortion, bias, hearsay, speculation, or pure fantasy. Beliefs pass as knowledge and are clung to as reliable certainties.

The term ego refers to one’s experience of oneself as a center of willing, desiring, reflecting, and acting. The ego is a “subject” to whom psychic contents are “represented.” It is like a mirror. Moreover, a connection to the ego is the necessary condition for making anything conscious—a feeling, a thought, a perception, or a fantasy. The ego is a kind of mirror in which the psyche can see itself and can become aware. Against the opinion of the East, Jung argues that without an ego, consciousness itself becomes questionable.

While the ego can be regarded as the center of selfishness, it is also the center of altruism. In and of itself, the ego, as Jung understood and described it, is morally neutral, not a “bad thing” as one hears it referred to in common parlance but a necessary part of human psychological life. The ego is what sets humans apart from other creatures of nature who also possess consciousness; it also sets the individual human being apart from other human beings. It is the individualizing agent in human consciousness.

What makes the ego grow, according to Jung, is what he calls “collisions.” In other words, conflict, trouble, anguish, sorrow, suffering. These are what lead the ego to develop. The requirements made upon a person to adapt to physical and psychic environments draws upon a potential center in consciousness and strengthens its capacity to function, in order to focus consciousness and to mobilize the organism in a specific direction. A moderate amount of conflict with the environment and some frustration are, therefore, according to Jung, the best conditions for ego growth.

If this person is born into a culture that rewards the extroverted attitude more than the introverted one, or into a family that negatively reinforces introversion, the ego is forced to adapt to the environment by developing extroversion. This comes at a high price. The introverted person must assume a good deal of chronic psychological stress in order to make this work.

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